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Cerebralbore101 on 14 June 2018
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CGI-Quality said:
Cerebralbore101 said:

Here's a two minute video showing the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKHfOfojF8w Without Ray-Tracing and SSS you can see that the light doesn't go through the alien guy's ears very realistically. With it the light goes through the ears. And that's pretty much the only difference it makes at all. Under the right lighting conditions, with the right environment, you could get some pretty neat results with this. For example; you could have a tropical forest with rays of strong sunlight shining realistically through thousands of SSS'd leaves in the jungle canopy. But not all games are going to use the perfect location for highlighting that type of graphics effect. 

My friend, I work with graphics. Daily. I don’t need that video.

 

Edit: Total Poly Count: 1.05 million, Advanced SSS/AF/Tessellated Character & Tessellated Hair:

 

Character Poly Count: 329K, No SSS/Low AF/No Tessellation On Character nor Hair:

The top image above wouldn't have been possible on any last gen console. The bottom? Easily. And that's one of the thinest examples. Remove all of those advanced features and you're left with a character model that is considerably less detailed.

 The average person doesn't realize it, but today's games are vastly superior to last gen games. So much going on behind the scenes and in the pipeline. They would have been impossible to do on the PS3 or 360.   That's what I'm getting at. No reason for us to not aim for better hardware after the previous has run its course (the PS4 and Xbox One are 5 years old).

Aside from the ear, and some slight differences in the skin/hair visually it is the same. On a technical level the two models are vastly different, but on a visual level it barely looks improved. A two inch wide 100 sided cylinder looks exactly the same as a two inch wide 10,000 sided cylinder, in a 3D Modeling program. That is especially true once you add smoothing groups. Diminishing returns are a huge problem, when it comes to graphics. 

Edit: And that ear only looks better because of a poor retopology job. Add another 2K polys to those ears, and the blockyness goes away. No need to triple the polycount of the entire model.